He skulked closer. The foot of the tower was as grand around as a nobleman’s country manor house, all of the same black stone, and every edge adorned with the sort of pointlessly elaborate spikes that made Lief wonder how many Ghantish masons were accidentally impaled during its construction. Of course, it was the Evil Tower of the Dark Lord. Perhaps random deaths had been the point.

There was a set of great doors, big enough for a dragon riding an elephant to process out of—too big, really, even for the size of the tower, suggesting that the ground floor must contain a great deal of empty space. They were, in fact, far too big for anyone of Lief’s acquaintance to even reach the handle, and instead some practical-minded evil carpenter had installed a man-sized door set into the main portal, and that stood open.

Lief’s fingers twitched, a thief’s eternal instincts kindling to life at seeing such a breach of security. Well, I suppose the Dark Lord probably doesn’t get many visitors, he considered. Even so… It would be terrible to find that some other thief had already got to the place and cleaned it out.

At that point he had to stop and forcibly remind himself that robbing the Dark Lord was not the point of the exercise. The former possessions of Ultimate Darkness were notoriously difficult to fence, or indeed to physically divest oneself of before turning into a toad or becoming irrevocably evil oneself. More than one previous Dark Lord had started out as an opportunistic adventurer coming into possession of some damned memento or other.

But he crept closer, trying to work up a proper head of nervous energy while all the time the great almost-empty valley stood silent around him.

Is everyone on holiday or something? Is it Evil Pilgrimage Week?

When someone came out of that smaller door, it was more a relief than a shock.

Lief saw a couple of Ghants: not armed and armored as warriors of the Dark Lord’s Dread Host, but just wearing stained and patched robes, and carrying… buckets, actually. Squint as he might, Lief could not particularly characterize them as evil buckets, although from the way that the Ghants held them at arm’s length they were probably evil-smelling. The two gray-skinned humanoids shuffled around the tower, and Lief shadowed them soundlessly, waiting to discover what nastiness was going on.

There was a garden there, he saw. It was a wretched thing, a long trough chipped out of the stone and filled with an ashy gray earth, in which thorny, twisted plants grew. Poisons, Lief wondered. Magic potion ingredients, maybe? Whatever grew there, the locals weren’t stinting on the fertilizer. The Ghantishmen slopped the contents of the buckets about without much energy, the reek of it enough to wrinkle Lief’s nose where he hid.